Monday, July 17, 2017

Arrival

I have caught up with a few sci-fi films recently such as Interstellar and The Martian, but Arrival was the best of the bunch. Why?

Well let me ask you a question. Have you ever met someone so unaware of world geography that they might say something such as, 'I wouldn't want to go to Africa because I don't speak African.'

So the premise of this film is that when life forms from another world arrive they may not come in a single craft to explore, or as an invasion fleet to attack. They might come in a small fleet and all distribute themselves around the earth.

The 'arrival' happens in the opening scenes after a brief back-story concerning the lead character, a linguist called Loiuse Banks, which we need to know. And the different nations that are visited engage in various ways and are reluctant to share their learning.

It occurs to me that I hope someone, somewhere has drawn the conclusion that if we are ever visited by another world the only response possible and sensible is a peaceful one. Any life form that has worked out how to do space travel will, we must assume, have vastly superior weapons technology.

Note also, in passing, that we should discard old ideas very slowly. On entering an alien space craft the team need to know if the atmosphere, which appears OK, will harm them at all. So they take a budgie.

And if we ever get to a planet with intelligent life on it we might bear in mind that more than one race might live there and some of them may be welcoming and some not.

Made I think.

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